How to Choose a Career True to You Without Buckling to Societal Pressure
Here's how to find a job that fits your personality
Ever wondered what makes a job truly fulfilling?
It’s not free coffee, causal Friday, and certainly not the much-maligned office pizza party.
If you want to feel fulfilled and happy in a job, don’t focus on the perks or even the salary.
Start with this question:
“Is this position within this company working with this specific group of people a good fit with my personality?”
Are you motivated by promotion or prevention?
A 2001 study titled “Regulatory Focus Theory: Implications for the Study of Emotions at Work” examined how a person’s so-called ‘regulatory focus’ impacts job satisfaction.
According to regulatory focus theory, there are two kinds of workers:
Promotion-focused: People motivated by career advancement and personal development. Promotion-focused people aim to align their actual selves with their ideal selves—their goal is to become the person they believe they want to be
Prevention-focused: People motivated by security and responsibility. Prevention-focused people want to align their actual selves with their ought self—that is, the person they believe they should be, which is informed by their sense of duty and obligation.
Start with a strong organizational fit
If you want to be happy and have a sense of purpose at work, you’ll want to ensure your job aligns with your regulatory focus.
Promotion-focused people should seek work environments that encourage growth and innovation.
An environment that often provides clear opportunities for advancement, publically recognizes achievements, and allows for creative thinking and risk-taking is ideal.
Some potentially fulfilling career paths for promotion-focused people include:
Entrepreneurship and Startups
Advertising and marketing
Sales jobs
Research and Development
Corporate Leadership Roles
Meanwhile, Prevention-Focused people are more likely to thrive in structured and consistent environments with clear rules and expectations.
Workplaces emphasizing reliability, safety, and attention to detail are ideal for prevention-focused individuals. These settings provide a sense of security and stability, aligning well with their desire to avoid mistakes and fulfill responsibilities effectively.
Some potentially fulfilling career paths for prevention-focused people include:
Accounting and Finance: These sectors require meticulous attention to detail and adherence to established procedures and regulations.
Government and Public Administration: Jobs in these sectors often provide stability and are structured around clear rules and guidelines.
Healthcare Professions: Roles like nursing, medical doctor, pharmacy, or lab technicians where protocol adherence and patient safety are paramount.
Legal Profession: Jobs in law, whether as an attorney or legal assistant, often involve ensuring compliance with laws and regulations.
Engineering and Architecture: These fields require precision, thoroughness, and a strong focus on safety and standards.
The easiest way to be miserable 40+ hours per week is to take a job that is a poor fit with your regulatory focus.
If you put a prevention-focused person in a 100% commission sales job, they will turn into a ball of anxiety and unrelenting stress.
On the flip side, if a promotion-focused person becomes an accountant for the government, they will be miserable; they will go to work every day feeling the soul-crushing weight of the tedious nature of the job and limitations for thinking outside the box.
Identifying Your Regulatory Focus
It’s hard to overstate the importance of knowing whether you are motivated by promotion or prevention.
Start by thinking about past career decisions and what your motivations were.
These days, I feel like I have a split between promotion and prevention—but when I first graduated from University, I had a very strong prevention focus on my career.
In my 20s, my mantra was, “Don’t get fired.”
This was largely motivated by past financial scars and personal hurdles following the financial crisis.
The stronger my financial position has become over the years, the more I have begun shifting to a promotion focus. Instead of “Don’t get fired,” I go to work thinking about new ways to increase efficiency. If I can maximize the value I bring, I can maximize my career earnings.
The simplest way to gauge whether you have a promotion or prevention focus is to pay close attention to your emotional response to different types of tasks at work.
If you are asked to lead a new project, does that fill you with excitement or dread?
Does the idea of crunching numbers on a spreadsheet make you feel calm or like you’ve been sentenced to death by boredom?
Try keeping an emotional journal of all the different tasks you are required to perform at work and weigh how often you feel positive vs. negative emotions.
Final thought
Resist the societal pressure to feel like you should take a certain type of job.
If you are promotion-focused, you might be told by family members or mentors to “play it safe” and take a “sensible” job with a steady paycheck and predictable work conditions.
Prevention-focused people are more likely to be introverts—and boy, does society love telling introverts that they should be extroverts. For some people, it’s perfectly okay to show up at the office, do your job, go home, and live your life. It’s okay to look at a job as a paycheck and means to fund your life and support your family.
Whether you are promotion or prevention-focused, if you let others convince you to take a job that is a poor fit, you will have that feeling of dread every Sunday night, knowing you have to go back to a job that is impossible for you to enjoy.
Figure out who you are, and find a job that rewards you for being you.
This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any significant financial decisions.
Interesting, Ben. I used to be promotion-focused but when a lay-off was looming, I changed to prevention-focused.
This came at an incredibly good time. Thank you so much